On July 12th, Reddit is participatingin Fight for the Future’s Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality, joining a broad coalition of companies, advocacy organizations, and communities across our site to voice our support for the open internet. We’re also hosting an ongoing Net Neutrality AMA series in the lead-up to our site-wide engagements on the Day of Action.

Why We Care

But first, here’s some background on why this fight is important to us.

Net neutrality rules, set by the FCC, ensure that internet service providers treat all internet traffic the same. They may not block, throttle, or otherwise restrict content. Without net neutrality, these providers could privilege their own content or slow down other traffic for their own profit. This would jeopardize one of the defining features of the internet: openness and consumer choice.

In fact, Reddit itself would likely not exist without the open internet. When Reddit launched a little over twelve years ago, the team behind it was tiny, attracting users solely through word of mouth. Since then, the site has grown year after year and currently has around 300 million monthly users, but we would not have been able to reach this point if people had to pay extra to access our site.

Reddit is built on the premise of letting individuals decide what content they find interesting. We believe the same basic principle should apply to the internet as a whole.

Ask Reddit Historians

Fortunately, the FCC’s commenting period is open until August 16, and redditors have a long history of making their voices heard in the fight for net neutrality. We’ve seen a single post inspire thousands of comments on the FCC’s website:

Day of Action

Last month, we kicked off a net neutrality-themed AMA series leading up to the Day of Action, bringing politicians, journalists, and open internet advocates to Reddit to discuss why protecting the open internet is important.

On July 12, we’re planning a site-wide engagement to encourage redditors to voice their support for the open internet, along with a special message from our co-founder Alexis, who has led the charge for the open internet at Reddit for years.

Unsurprisingly, this fight has already been top of mind for communities across Reddit, with discussions of the FCC’s impending repeal lighting up subreddits like r/technology, r/Futurology, r/news, and r/politics, as well as dedicated pro-net neutrality communities like r/KeepOurNetFree. Even subreddits that have no overt connection to politics have joined the conversation.

We’re proud that over a hundred communities have already signed on to participate alongside us in Fight for the Future’s Day of Action—from huge subreddits with millions of subscribers (r/videos, r/movies, r/music), gaming communities (r/PCMasterRace, r/hearthstone, r/DnD), fan subreddits (r/adventuretime, r/DunderMifflin, r/adultswim), animal lovers (r/Thisismylifemeow, r/Blop), meme lovers (r/MemeEconomy, r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns), and more.

Want to join us? Visit Reddit’s front page next Wednesday, check out battleforthenet.com, and stay tuned for more net neutrality-themed AMAs in the meantime.